The Pilgrims' March/Mr. Shyam Sunder Chakrabutty
BABU SHYAM SUNDER CHAKRA BUTTY.
OUR STUDENTS.
Students of Bengal! You have ever been her hope and strength. It is you who have always felt, worked and suffered for her; you have obeyed her call, regardless of consequences; you have held your country dearer than prospects in life; you have been shadowed, spied on, insulted, imprisoned and exiled with hardly a word of love, sympathy or commiseration breathed for you. You have been misunderstood, misrepresented and maligned, but you have not swerved from your duty. You have fed the famished, relieved the flood-stricken, regulated the rush of pilgrims during festivals, furthered the cause of peace and progress, received encomiums of the guardians of law and order, but at the next moment been handed over to the tender mercies of the police as criminals and culprits of the basest type. You have known many ups and downs, but have never been unduly elated or depressed. I am one of those who have an intimate knowledge of what you had to pay for your self-less devotion to your country. I am one of those who drained with you the bitter cup to the dregs. I know the stuff that is in you, I feel the pulse that beats in you, I dream the dream that sustains and inspires you on your dreary march. Will you then fail the country in this supreme crisis when she has just begun to go your way? The stern discipline of suffering, the salutary schooling of experience, the example and precept of the greatest living Indian have at last set you on the right road to salvation. Bring therefore to the altar of the Mother the offering of your holy ardour and enthusiasm. What is your education and instinct worth if interested cry is suffered to pass for public opinion, if sycophancy is suffered to masquerade as citizenship, if tales of petty personal inconveniences are suffered to flaunt themselves as correct reports of national happenings, if an honest appeal to national self-respect is suffered to be stigmatised as coercion and intimidation, if the proud man’s “ipse dixite” are suffered to be elevated to the rank of facts and truths, if the most unwarranted restriction of your commonest right—the right to speak, write, associate and serve—is suffered to assume the sanctity and majesty of law? Will you allow the God in you to be thus insulted? If not, then accept this challenge to your divinity; if not, then call up the spirit in you, if not, then meet hatred with love, misrepresentation with becoming silence, and persecution with noble self-suffering. You are out to teach how wrong ought to be righted, how the very germ of evil is to be killed by goodness, how to make the creed of suffering and sacrifice the established creed of the world, in short, to vindicate the innate dignity and majesty of your soul. One supreme effort is called for. Think and act.